Leadtek Winfast GeForce 256 DDR

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Leadtek Winfast GeForce 256 DDR - Page 1

Semiconductor
Technology is fascinating. An engineer
will come up with a new technology that allows
for a significant increase in performance over
existing technology, as with the NVidia GeForce.
As the new platform matures, the speed and
throughput of given device is realized and the
limitations are exposed. At that point,
another brilliant engineer sets out to improve
again on the initial design in an effort to
alleviate the bottlenecks and achieve yet an
even higher level of performance. As we
all know, this process happens at an alarming
rate in the Computer and Networking Industries
as well as Semiconductors.

Local
memory bandwidth was an initial bottleneck for
NVidia GeForce chipset based 3D Graphics
cards. It was a bottleneck that was
envisioned early on by NVidia however.
They designed the initial GeForce architecture
to be capable of interfacing to a new high
performance SDRAM and SGRAM with double the data
rate of current standard DRAM
architectures. DDR SDRAM/SGRAM, or Double
Data Rate Synch DRAM, allows any device
interfacing to it to perform reads and writes to
the DRAM on the rising and falling edge of the
memory clock cycle. With each clock cycle,
you can perform both a read from and a write to
the memory. As a result the effective
throughput of the DDR SDRAM is doubled.
Hence the term, "double data
rate".

This
is the technology behind both the DDR SDRAM and
DDR SGRAM. SGRAM is Synchronous Graphics
RAM that is configured to cater to the needs
of 2D/3D Graphics designs. It is
comprised of the same basic cell technology of
the DRAM.

This
is our evaluation of the Leadtek
Winfast GeForce256 DDR. Let's see what new
tricks DDR Memory has up its sleeve.

Leadtek
Winfast GeForce256 DDR -
Specifications

A
neat and clean little machine

NVIDIA GeForce 256, 256-bit GPU

32MB high-speed
DDR SGRAM
Memory

Quad-Engine? Design for complete 3D
pipeline

Transform Engine

Lighting Engine

Setup Engine

Rendering Engine

350 MHz RAMDAC support display resolution
up to 2048x1536

32-bit Z-buffer/stencil

Optimized for Direct3D acceleration with
complete hardware support for DirectX 7

Cube Environment Mapping

Full OpenGL 1.2 ICD driver support.

32 bits true color texture mapping
support.

Hardware Transform and Lighting

Optional Digital Flat Panel interface with
scaling and filtering for flat panels up to
1600x1200

TV-out support up to 800x600 resolution

Full PC99 and PC99a compliant

The
card we tested had VGA and TV-Out but no flat
panel support. The card in the picture
above has a flat panel connector. It is
the black base connector in this picture.
In addition, this card came with 32Mb Infineon
(formerly known as Siemens Semconductor) DDR
SGRAM (Synchronous Graphics RAM rated at 6ns.
This RAM is also rated at 300MHz. DDR.
Interestingly enough, Infineon also has this
memory available rated as fast as 5ns.
This should allow for 400 MHz. DDR should it be
utilized by Leadtek or other graphics card
manufacturers some day.

There
is also a fairly good heat sink and fan combo on
the Winfast GeForce DDR, as with other NVidia
based solutions from Leadtek. It could be
a little more substantial and thus provide
better heat dissipation. Never the less,
it does the job adequately.